A French street artist known only as ‘Invader’ just got done dropping over a dozen new mosaic tile installations all over Los Angeles while in town for the group show Beyond the Streets. The best one might just be a portrait of The Dude himself, the eponymous figure from the cult film The Big Lebowski, standing outside a bowling alley with a cocktail in hand. Others are modeled after characters from the 8-bit video game Space Invaders, which the artist has left in over 30 countries over the past two decades.

Invader chooses his target cities, scopes out the locations for his installations in advance and preps them as much as possible before putting them up. The oldest ones can be found in Paris, but if you want an idea of just how prolific Invader has been over the years, check out the interactive map on his website.

The mosaics are relatively small and often quite discreet, occasionally blending into the color schemes of their environments. He doesn’t typically get permission to put them up, but they’re so charming, it’s easy to see why they can remain in place for so long. Invader’s choices for placement have sometimes been controversial, however – in January 2018, he came under fire for installing a few in sacred Buddhist temples of Bhutan. The government ultimately removed them.

Scope the whole gallery of recent Los Angeles pieces, or head over to Invader’s Instagram to keep up with the works as they’re completed.

Street artists turn entire cities into open-air galleries, but there are countless ways to carry out urban art interventions, and they’re at their most fun when they subvert existing structures. Virtually anything can be transformed into a surface or medium for art: billboards, phone booths, construction walls, street signs and even furniture discarded on the curb. Sometimes the motivation is political – calling attention to how much public space is dedicated to advertising, for example – but sometimes it’s just fun, like painting clown faces on busted couches.

Art in Ad Places Takes on Phone Booths

Pay phones themselves may have largely disappeared long ago, but the shelters that held them can often still be found on the sidewalks of large cities like New York. ‘Art in Ad Places,’ a campaign replacing outdoor advertising with artwork, partners with artists to install their work in these shelters. 55 new pieces went up in 2017. They say they believe outdoor advertising is visual pollution, psychologically damaging and pushed on viewers without their consent – but the places it’s found is ripe for subversion for other messages. “By replacing advertisements with artwork, Art in Ad Places provides a public service and an alternative vision of our public environment,” they explain.

Vermibus Remixes Ads with Acid

An artist known as Vermibus reduces the impact of advertisements by sweeping through cities and modifying ads with acid to rob them of context and turn them into strange painterly works of art. It’s a literal smear campaign, and it’s kind of genius. All he has to do is don a safety vest, remove the ads, take them home to transform them and then put them back up.

“By opening those spaces, I make them vulnerable and I create a conversation not only with the brands or the companies that put advertising in the public space but also with the citizen, breaking the unidirectional message,” the artist says in an interview with Open Walls Gallery. “Awareness is a very important and personal part of every artwork… the adverts might be legitimate if the viewer decides consciously to see them. But in order to have a conscious decision about that, we need to be aware of their dangers and for that we should be informed in the first place. [Advertising] is addictive, affects mentally and chemically our body, our decisions, our environment… it has a huge risk on all the levels that we are ignoring.”

Curbside Furniture Art by Lonesome Town

The unwanted furniture we kick out to the curb gets a chance to vent, however temporarily, in the hands of artist Lonesome Town. Traveling through Los Angeles, the artist paints sad clown faces on couches, chairs, computer monitors and other rejects. For a few brief days, each piece gets its time in the spotlight, becoming a work of art before it’s hauled off to the dump to die. Follow Lonesometown9 on Instagram for lots more.

Spontaneous Temporary Interventions by Brad Downey

American-born, Berlin-based artist Brad Downey is a master of Dada hacktivism, turning everyday objects and infrastructure in cities into whimsical, temporary works of art. A bike left chained beside a river might become a fountain, for example; he’ll put a public bench on skates, cut out a chunk of the pavement and stand it on end, tear down street signs and reassemble them into spiky sculptures. Sometimes his larger sculptural works are commissioned, but more often, he’s working intuitively, taking opportunities as he sees them. Each piece is a fun reinterpretation of its materials, sometimes rendering the objects useless and sometimes making them more effective.

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Art Everywhere 12 Projects Transform Public Spaces Into Guerrilla Galleries

The beach is one big billboard for companies looking to surreptitiously market their products, from Game of Thrones to Jim Beam, which would be annoying if most of these guerrilla installations weren’t so fun. Plus, some of these site-specific seaside installations are the work of mysterious anonymous artists, or organizations raising awareness for issues like sea turtle protection and skin cancer avoidance.

Game of Thrones Dragon Washed Up on a British Beach

A 40-foot-long dragon skull seemingly washed up on Charmouth Beach in Dorset, England in the spring of 2013, likely only puzzling onlookers who aren’t familiar with the HBO series Game of Thrones. Still, it’s a pretty fun example of guerrilla marketing, especially since this area is known as the ‘Jurassic Coast,’ where lots of dinosaur fossils turn up. It took three sculptors over two months to design, sculpt and paint the skull. Who could resist climbing inside?

Jim Beam Creates the World’s Largest Cooler at Bondi Beach

Jim Beam and the ESKY cooler company teamed up to temporarily transform the Bondi Icebergs Pool into the world’s largest cooler for the filming of a commercial. The cooler was filled with about half a million gallons of water, over 500 giant ice cubes and 33 supersized Jim Beam cans.

King Kong Footsteps at the Santa Monica Pier

Giant footsteps and a smashed lifeguard truck appeared to signal total chaos at the Santa Monica Pier in June 2010, signaling the opening of the new Universal Studios Hollywood theme park attraction, King Kong 360 3-D. This ambient advertisement by the firm David&Goliath was a accompanied by a ‘news report’ on YouTube. Does this make anyone else miss the old King Kong ride? RIP, King Kong Encounter, which burned down in 2008.

Unexplained Giant Lego Man

A life-sized Lego Man washed up on a Florida beach with the somewhat nonsensical message ‘NO REAL THAN YOU ARE’ printed on its chest. Measuring about 8 feet tall and weighing 100 pounds, the ‘man’ was discovered on the Siesta Key beach. The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office sent out a tongue-in-cheek press release reporting that they had taken the ‘man’ into custody, and found ‘Ego Leonard’ written on his back. Then, another one washed up in Japan. Turns out, Ego Leonard is the pseudonym of an anonymous Dutch artist, and his creations show up periodically on beaches around the world. Somebody should warn King Kong, so he doesn’t step on him.

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Messages In The Sand 12 Great Guerrilla Ads At The Beach River Banks

Guerrilla street artist Clet Abraham may be the Banksy of the boulevard, hacking road signs with stickers and encouraging people to question authority. Our lead image dated August 31st of 2013 comes courtesy of Flickr member Oilvier Ortelpa, who snapped Abraham’s enhanced traffic sign in Brussels, capital of the EU.

Clet Abraham‘s creative road sign hacks turn everyone’s frowns upside down – well, unless you work for the City – but his subversive street sign stencils are meant to be more than just amusing. The Florence, Italy-based guerrilla artist sees graphic, no-nonsense road signs as uncompromising symbols of authority. His clever stencils facilitate alternate interpretations of the signs’ harsh and uncompromising symbolism, and thus invite the public to think twice before blindly obeying those anonymous commands.

One of Abraham’s favorite targets is the ubiquitous red & white NO ENTRY sign. Possibly alluding to the human tragedy of Europe’s migrant crisis, Abraham hopes to provoke more public debate over the concept of NO ENTRY and what it means to not only those hoping to come to Europe but those already living there. Some examples of the artist’s work in his hometown of Florence are shown above, snapped by Flickr member Marianne (Mariannera) in October of 2013.

When In Rome, Hack The Signs

Now 50 years old, Abraham has lived in Florance since 2005 but originally hails from Brittany, France. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes before moving to Rome, where he honed his skills restoring antique artworks – you won’t find any botched frescoes on his resume!

It was the “omnipresence of street signs” in Italy, however, that spurred Abraham “to intervene, both to notify the public of the absurdity of the situation, and to propose a constructive and respectful alternative.”  Flickr member Philosofia captured a small selection of Abraham’s work on the streets of Rome in January of 2012.

Labor Of Love

“My adhesives are developed to add a further level of reading (to street signs),” adds Abraham, “constructed on the base of their original signification in order to maintain its utility but give it some intellectual, spiritual, or simply amusing interest. The final objective? That traffic keeps flowing without us feeling spoken down to!” Flickr member Irene Grassi snapped the above sun-faded stenciled sign in Florence on January 1st of 2015.

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Warming Signs Clet Abraham Rewrites Rules Of The Road

Nobody knows the needs of a city better than the residents who navigate it each day, so who better to edit, adapt and upgrade urban spaces to make them cooler and more useful? Urban ‘hacktivism’ takes underutilized architecture and infrastructure, from street signs to empty subway stations, and subverts it for a new purpose. Whether installed guerrilla-style or with the blessing of city officials, these projects make the city a more fun and comfortable place to hang out.

Arche de la Defense Occupation by Parasitic Guerrilla Architecture

What if citizens took the lack of affordable and accessible housing in cities into their own hands, and simply created their own residences wherever they saw fit? ‘Pocket of Active Resistance’ envisions how this would manifest in Paris, as guerrilla housing takes over monuments like the Arche de la Defense. Architect Stéphane Malka presents a modular housing system stuck right into the interior walls of la Defense, connected by scaffolding and catwalks.

Alleyway Squat Housing by WEAK!

The firm ‘WEAK!’ encourages the organic growth of illegal structures on all sorts of city surfaces, including rooftops, disused fields and abandoned skyscrapers, reflecting “the citizen’s right to express himself through architecture.” Among the projects they’ve brought to life throughout Taiwan is this elevated alleyway dwelling made primarily of scaffolding, which creates a new two-level residence while leaving room on the ground for pedestrians to pass through.

Parasite 2.0 Colony in Venice

Young Italian collective Parasite 2.0 took over a series of disused spaces throughout Italy as part of a 2013 urban occupation project, including the fort of the Sant’Andrea island in the Venetian lagoon. Stretching polyethylene through the frame of an abandoned building like a web, they created an amorphous series of rooms with built-in hammocks.

Cascade Project by Edge Design Institute

A staircase in Hong Kong that took up lots of space yet saw very little foot traffic temporarily became the setting for a vibrant geometric mesh sculpture with built-in seating and planters, creating a miniature park right in the middle of The Centrium. ‘The Cascade Project’ by Edge Design Institute features a living canopy of Bauhinia trees and other plants, giving the staircase an alternate and ultimately more useful purpose.

Art & Culture Center Beneath a Railway in Japan

While this project was completed with the blessing of the city of Yokohama, it’s a pretty cool example of how underutilized urban spaces can be taken over and transformed for the benefit of all residents. Situated on a once-obsolete and uneasily quiet street, right beneath a railway track, the new arts center includes a gallery, cafe and studio.

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Occupy Urban Spaces 10 Guerrilla Modifications To City Infrastructure